SUZY EDDIE IZZARD Did Sword Fighting In London

Hey, buddy. Hey, Sufi. We got to see each other last week. I know. Which is so nice. Very briefly. Very briefly. I saw you. We literally basically just saw each other for the course of a podcast. Yeah. A little bit, you know, pre-game. Little green room, little green room action. Yeah. And a lot of fun. It was fun. I had a great time. Yeah. We, for anyone who was excited to listen to the hat, we interviewed Mackenzie. Yeah. It was, I mean, I feel like the festival itself, which I love doing, that kind of got hit by that storm that, that hit the sort of East Coast. Yeah. And there were a lot of grand plans for the sort of guests we might have. Yeah. And Mackenzie, to her credit, suggested she's like, well, I could step in and I have some insights. I don't know if I knew that, which is great, because I felt a little like we'd put her on the spot. So I'm glad that she actually had some enthusiasm for it. Yeah. I will say in terms of being put on the spot, which she, she thought she might be on this podcast someday, but she didn't think it would be a live recording with like, you know, 100 plus people watching us in a ballroom. So in the end, she kind of got burned super hard. Yeah. Because she like put herself out there and didn't realize she'd be in front of an audience. Yeah. But, you know, we went to, I mean, she was great. When we came to New York, she was, she got a three day trip out of it. So everyone that comes on this podcast doesn't get a three day vacation. That's true. Yeah. I mean, I would say the opposite. Most of us just have to sit in our, you know, living room. I also apologize. I've had it queued up. I have not listened to you and mom do the listener episode. I'm sort of saving it for, for when I'm down in the dumps and need something to cheer me up. Yeah. She's great. How did, how did hurry do? She was great. And she was, she was very nervous, but yeah, I think, you know, our listeners will, will know her and will appreciate her. And that's, you know, Yeah. I can't imagine any of our listeners sort of, you know, chiming in with let me down. You know who let me down this time? Old, old hurry. Although maybe daddy will write in a comment. Maybe daddy will be like, hurry could really. Goes without saying. Yeah. Cause he's never, if dad was in politics, he would never be in a, one of those politicians who refused to give a comment. Yeah. He, he was actually on a family trip. He went down to Florida. He did. To see some cousins. And our cousin Shannon was also flying down there. And I talked to mom. I thought dad was back on Sunday. So I called the house and mom answered and she's like, well, your father's flight's delayed. So I guess I'm glad I'm not on that trip. And it's like, how long did it delayed? And it was like an hour. Yeah. And she's like, and yesterday they went to Cape Canaveral. I mean, Yeah, they did some real family trip stuff. And the last thing in the world I would have wanted to do. And I was like, well, I think that sounds cool. And then I called dad and he's like, we went to Cape Canaveral. It was great. It's very funny that he did the sort of trip you would do with children without children. Yeah. He sent pictures of me like sitting in a, you know, the space shuttle chair. Yeah. I mean, he did it. So I would share it with the children. He wasn't like, he didn't think that me as a 52 year old be like, whoa. I mean, I would have liked to see that picture. He didn't send it to me, but. Well, yeah, I'll forward it on to you. I think I have his permission to send forward a pixel. Yeah. Yeah. He was, I also called her and she was like, well, he's home any minute. She told a long, she told a long story about, you know, I guess he flew out of Manchester, New Hampshire, left the car there, then flew back to Boston and was going to take a car service to Manchester to get the car. His car. Yeah. But he brought a mom had a lot of criticisms about the way he packed his luggage because he brought a duffel bag and he put the car keys in the side pouch of the duffel bag, which he didn't zip up. So he lost the car keys. Did he really? Yeah. Now he had a spare pair at home. So he just had to come home. But of course the downside as was expressed to me, and this was not visually expressed, but I could kind of hear mom's eyes rolling was like, so now I got to drive him to the airport in the morning. It didn't seem as though the heart had an absence that made the heart grow fonder in this case. No. I will say, I had a wonderful thing and I won't have any in front of me right now. So, but I got excited about, because we, when I think about the books on tape we used to listen to in car rides, the two authors that we listened to the most were Jean Shepherd. Yeah. Christmas story. Christmas story, who I believe's book is called, In God We Trust All Others, Pay Cash. I hope I'm making that up. And, or I'm not making that up. And then we listened to a ton of PG Woodhouse. I don't quite understand when that started, but we listened to all the Jeeves books. Yeah. Which is such a funny thing to think about now. But somebody had just posted on Twitter, what is your favorite PG Woodhouse line? No wrong answers. So it was just like the best of Twitter where it was just people writing quotes. And so I knew mom was at home alone. And so I called her up and just read her a bunch of Woodhouse quotes. And it was a delightful 25 minute conversation. I bet she loved them. She loved them. Yeah. She was like, she was cough laughing, which is really good. I just, I was just listening to some Woodhouse. I get to see if I can, I don't want it to play, but because there's so many different, narrators who do those. Oh yeah. And I was like, who, what's the best one? And if you're, if you're looking for one of these, I believe Jonathan Cecil is the, Okay. the premier. He's the one you liked the most. Yeah. Okay. We also, I was driving the boys skiing this weekend. I also want to talk, you saw the kids and I wasn't there. Yeah. So I wanted an update on that, but I was driving the boys skiing this weekend. The boys see our neighbor's newspaper in the morning. Mm-hmm. You know, we, they come out and she has her newspapers delivered and she gets the New York post. So the cover of the New York post is, you know, by design, you know, super sensationalistic about whatever the news of the day is. And so over the course of the last couple of months, there are a lot of headlines that are fascinating to young children, be it about Cartel leader killed in Mexico, Maduro getting kidnapped by the US government and then Iran. Like there are all these big stories. And so the kids were asking me about them and I was doing my best to, you know, answer questions and, you know, and I try to answer them shortly. I don't do like the full closer look. Right. You don't talk about the fall of the Shah. No, I don't go that far back with that said though, I was like, Hey, you guys want to listen to some reporters talk about it? And they were like, yeah. And so we listened to the daily. Oh, you know, and I hate to shout out another podcast, you know, I'm not sure. But shout out to Michael Barbaro and everybody over the daily. They were riveted. Huh. And it was really exciting to be like, Oh, this is a, this is a perfect bite. And they made me pause a lot to ask questions. No, I was going to say, did you find a half hour way to make those kids shut up? No, they had a lot of questions. Like, cause they say things about like, you know, the cartel is decapitated and then it's like, what does decapitated mean? And then there's like basically seven minutes about how nobody's head actually got cut off. And then, and then there's a lot of questions about like, we actually, you can't disprove a negative. So, you know, Axel kept saying, but like there might be somebody's head might have gotten cut off. Sure. And I would, I would concede the point while also saying that is not why the good people of the daily used decapitated. Yeah. Yeah, but that was great. But you saw the kids. So what happened was you came in, we did a Thursday morning podcast. I could not make a, after my show, I had plans that I couldn't break. So you were on your own with Mackenzie and you went over to see my children, fill me in. We got there pre-children, which was great because we got to just like sit with Alexi for a half hour and catch up. And then Addy came home and as you well know, she is kind of the light of everyone's life. And she was, Yeah. And a big fan, a big Mackenzie fan from way back. Yeah. She is just impossibly cute. And then your brother-in-law went to go get the boys and Alexi said, Tolia, don't tell the boys they're here. Let it be a surprise. And so he took off and we were hanging out with Addy. And when the boys came in, they like, they were like, Mom, where's our present? And she's like, what? There's not a present. There's a surprise. And Ash said, no, there's a present. Tolia said, you're getting me an ATV for my birthday. And- Your brother. So your brother-in-law, Tolia, had tried to like throw them off the scent. I don't know why he said anything. By telling them a better thing. A better thing. So when the boys came in, they like ran in and they were like, Mom, where's our present? And she's like, what? There's not a present. There's not a better thing. So when they saw me and Mackenzie, they couldn't have been less excited. So he threw them off the scent by giving them the scent of something they would prefer more. And like, they also, their birthdays are both like in a month, right? Yeah. They're right around the corner. It's not on them to be like, they're like totally fine to have been excited. Yeah. Also, good luck to you getting them something for their birthday that they're going to like. Because right now the bar is ATV. Yeah. Yeah. But Addy also had us like taking the couch apart in the little TV room and making a boat. And was crawling under these cushions. And then all of us went into that room and there was a lot of jumping off the couches. I feel like they had Olympic fever because. Oh yeah, it was Olympic fever time. Yeah. And so we were playing some, you know, some sandstorm, some Doruda sandstorm. And Axel would want me to tell him when to jump so that he could do a flip during the drop. Yeah. Sure, sure. Which Ash would push him inevitably right before he was going to do it, which one time he really whacked his nose. So, but they each have their techniques. I will say Ash is a spinner and Axel is a flipper and Addy is a flopper. Okay. Spin flip flop. Yeah. So yeah, so we had, we had a couple hours over there. It was really nice. And then it was, you know, it was bath time, bedtime, book time. And we got out of there. I had a good book moment with Axel the other day. We just finished the Great Brain books. Oh yeah. Eight books. I love them so much. I read them as a kid. Yeah. So much fun to read with Axel. Highly recommend. Last book of the eight. Basically, because the narrator is the younger brother of the Great Brain. So the last book, the last chapter of book eight is the Great Brain going off, going out east for like boarding school. And it's like a brother saying goodbye to a brother. Yeah. And I was so choked up and like crying. And Axel was like, why are you crying? And I go, it's just sad that their brothers are leaving. And then he started crying, but not really. Like he was like real pretend crying. But also there was a moment where they were talking about smoking tobacco and the Great Brain says to his younger brother, have you ever noticed that dad smells like tobacco and like a newsprint? And he's like, oh my God, dad does smell like tobacco and newsprint. And then Axel just interrupts and says, oh, I wonder what you smell like. And he smelled me and he goes, you smell like shit. And then I said, Axel. And he said, S-H-I-T. And I'm like, yeah, that's what I thought. Unbelievable. Unbelievable the things I put up with. This is a real, I mean, I'm so excited about today's guest. Yeah. Susie Eddie-Izzard is just like, has been a performer that we have been entertained by for years. And she has- Dressed to kill one of the great stand-up specialists of all time. I think that was my introduction to her. Yeah. And but she was like a street performer, I'm sure we'll get into this, but then, you know, comedian and then now has, you know, taken this dramatic turn and I saw her doing a one-person Hamlet, every part which she's touring the world now. And it was so good. And I, yeah, I happened to know the stage manager at that show and texted him at intermission. And he was like, oh, come back afterwards and meet Susie. So that's sort of what kicked this all off. I said, we've got a podcast and we'd love it if you'd come on. And she was like, yeah, great. Let's do it. So, so, so happy to. And yeah, I mean, one of the, I'll say as much to her, one of the most singular people I've ever had the chance to talk to. So I'm fascinated to know what the roots of this were. Yeah. And I know from digging into the bio a little bit, it is exactly as unique as one might think. Yeah. All right. Well, we're very excited to talk to her. And sometimes you record the intros after the conversation, but this time we're recording it before. So you're catching us in full excitement mode. Yeah, here we go. All right, here we go. Family chips with the my brothers, family chips with the my brothers, here we go. Yes, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, how are you guys doing? We're great. So happy to see you. Good to see you. I take it you're in the New York time in New York. I'm New York time. Yeah. Josh is LA time. All right. So Josh is in the same time as me. Yeah. I'm in Vancouver. So are you doing Hamlet in Vancouver right now? No, I was doing Hamlet in Toronto. Then I was going to go to Philadelphia, which I'm flying to in a couple of hours. I was doing an episode of Watson, the season finale of Watson, the CBS TV series. Oh, fantastic. So I'm coming in as the bad guy in that, which has all these elements of Sherlock Holmes-y stuff in it. So, um, Oh yeah. Well, spoiler alert that you're the bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, should I say that? No, it's, Do you, do you like switching gears in the middle of, you're obviously in the middle of this world tour of doing a one person Hamlet. Is it fun to then drop that for a little bit and go to Vancouver to do some television? It is actually, I mean, I think earlier in my dramatic career, I wouldn't have done this. I have these two separate weird careers. Um, you know, I have two separate agents in London. You know, one is drama, one is comedy, but it conf, it does confuse people. But, um, initially I remember hearing citizens around and say, um, she does, she really likes coming in to do a guest role in the films. They, um, as she comes for a week and then goes away and I thought, I couldn't do it. How would you do that? Cause you'd have to get your mind so in the zone, but having played, done multiple film drama things. Now I, I quite like it. You can come in. You can make some, some choices on, on how you can do the character. Um, it might be at a shorter notice, but I had two, two, three weeks notice for this. So I could come in, do that. And Hamlet's all with two on performance, 225 just happened. So I'm very happy where that is. And, uh, yeah, so it's nice to come from Hamlet go to this character who's based on one of the characters in the Conan Doyle. I think that's, that's what there's a friend. But, um, I keep, I keep thinking the word is earth, which means egg. It doesn't mean that. It's, but yes, play one of these characters and then go back to Hamlet tomorrow night. I'll be on stage in Philly. I mean, when you have such a grasp on Hamlet, especially one person, Hamlet, do you feel like that makes other acting not easier, but do you feel a freedom to go into other roles and just let it rip? It is definitely a good place to go, particularly if you're playing all the characters in Hamlet. Some critics have remonstrated with me, how dare you do this? You're not allowed to do this. Go to jail. Do not click 200. Um, and, but we've just been in there. And that was, um, we got these, these raft of amazing reviews in LA times. Um, it's very pretty. Charles McNulty, because he could really turn against things. So, uh, yeah, we're just, we're just riding high now after Australia and New Zealand. Um, so yes, it's definitely a bit of a, we're touring Hamlet. I just said it in the, in the elevator in the lift as we came up after shooting, met this family. Hi, what are you doing here? Oh, you're in holiday. What are you doing? I'm touring the world with Hamlet. Oh, mic dropped. Um, it is a bit of a, it's, you can say other things, you know, I'm doing a, oh, that's quite nice. You're doing a comedy. You're doing a this, you're doing a, you're doing a Hamlet around the world. It's just, you know, the world, the world tour aspect is really nice as well. The control to be able to say, right, I'm off and, um, let's go play that India. Like we, we were just going on a moment. Who's, who's really into that Shakespeare around the world? India really liked Shakespeare. Great. I've already played in India. So we've found out about context as a, can I come and play Hamlet across India? Yeah. Okay. We'll get into it straight away. So that's already, that's already public under, you know. Yeah. I did, I met you after, uh, one of those Los Angeles performances and you were just trying to recount a moment in the show and just the way you can sort of spin through the text. Um, cause it's obviously so ingrained in you at this point. It's, uh, it really is, I don't know what to say. It's, it's an uncommon skill that you have to be able to do something like this show and to carry it. The memorizing of it all. I mean, it's, it is a big chunky play. That is one thing. And I don't ask for lines as well. I made the decision three nights before the press night, the opening night in New York. I thought, let's not ask because you can do this thing of saying line. If you run out of, if you just goes out of your head and then stage manager is supposed to shout it out. And I thought, let's not do that anymore. So if I come off, I have to get myself back on the, the tram lines of where I'm going. Cause I know the story. I know where I'm going in the scene. Sometimes a word just drop out of my mind. I think, what is that word? And as I come up to, if I can't get it, I will say other words that will fit sometimes quite beautifully, sometimes quite weird. As long as I don't say, okay, dokey. That is not. It's funny how you always hear, oh, you know, Shakespeare was the first person to use that phrase, but I'm pretty certain. Doki Doki was not one of those. No. And also, there's a sitcom that Ben Alton wrote in the UK called upstart crow. And that had the fact that Shakespeare is supposed to go out with a raft of lines. But in fact, other people did before him and he co-opted things. And there were other people who wrote plays and a lot of the plays have been lost since the Elizabethan times. So, you know, Shakespeare was good, but there were a lot of other guys who were good as well. And Christopher Marlowe, you know, he got stabbed in the eye. And if only he hadn't been stabbed in the eye, he would have been, he would have had a lot more plays out there, but the plays that he's already written were very good. So, but it is, it is, it is kind of amazing. Because I was so intimidated by Shakespeare. You know, this is the thing. I, no one was lining me up for a Hamlet. So I just thought, well, I'll line me up for a Hamlet. And in that school, you know, probably in English, in English-speaking countries around the world, so in America, there'd be kids growing up. I don't know if you had some time in your teenage hood where the teacher said, now we're going to study this play and one of Shakespeare plays could well have come up in that. But if you guys found it, we also found it in turn. That's probably good to know. Yeah, it's good to know. We, we had just assumed you were all walking around quoting it. No, we all go, what the hell's he on about here? There's, there's, there's Elizabeth and verse. Okay, you can work out what the poet is trying to say, but sometimes she's using words which are, you know, 400 years older than not used anymore. And so he's like, I do not know what that word is. And so I don't know what you're talking about. So you had to spend time doing all these footnotes, these, oh, oh, that's what that word means. All right. Couldn't you say that? Oh, that's 400 years ago. Okay. I'll give you some slack. Hey, we're going to take a quick break and hear from some of our sponsors. Support comes from Ali Pop. Ooh. Good pop, posh. Thanks, Sufi. Ali Pop, it's a new kind of soda, Sufi. That combines the classic soda taste with the benefits of a functional ingredient blend to support digestive health. Ali Pop is reimagining soda with high fiber and low sugar. Also very beautiful cans. May I just add? Yeah, beautiful cans. And like this Ali Pop, it's so delicious. And specifically the root beer takes me back to mom was more of the baker. Mom would make cookies. Mom would make the odd cake. But dad would make root beer floats. By the way, every mom just rolled their eyes on the floor. Rightfully so. Mom, mom made cakes. Dad though, made the time intensive root beer float. He did love a root beer float. He did love a root beer float. And then it made us love root beer floats. Another thing, if you make a root beer float with Ali Pop, it's going to do a lot more for you than the ones dad was making for us back in the day. Absolutely. Two out of three Americans say they suffer from digestive issues. 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So I'm picky about that tomato. And I need a personal shopper that's as picky as me to pick the right one. The ripest one. A shopper who's going to care about my cart like it's theirs. See, shoppers with SHiPT are no ordinary shoppers because they know that no order is ordinary. It's never just delivery. Try SHiPT for free for 14 days. Download the app or visit shiPT.com. That's S-H-I-P-T.com. Terms apply. You have one of the most singular careers I can think of. You were one of the most singular performers. And I was so curious as to know how your upbringing affected that. And you were a traveler from the very beginning, it seems like. You were from a lot of different places. Age of one, yes. Because we were born in the city of Arden that the British called Aden because they couldn't pronounce R. I don't know quite now. They called it Arden. The Arabic people called it Arden. And it's at the bottom of Yemen. And the British took it a bit like the Guantanamo Bay situation which America said we'll have that. Thank you very much. Which is all part of Cuba. Which I didn't realize Guantanamo Bay is part of Cuba. It just sits at the end of Cuba. And then we did this with other things. It's a deep water port. So we didn't take the rest of Yemen. We just took that in that colony time of I think the 1700s. And said yes, we're bringing things back from India. What things? Nicknacks that the Indian people don't want. Really? Yes, but we found them lying around. They didn't have a flag. And so we put them back. We need a deep water port where we can refuel and stuff and then send them off. And I think this is Suez Canal. Either going round then Suez Canal opens and you went up the Red Sea. So that was born. And age one, I was off to Northern Ireland because a revolution was, this was part of my stand up. I used to say because a revolution happened in 67. So it was burbling up this revolution in Yemen. And so there's this idea that dad said, we've got to get out of here. There's a revolution coming. Where are we going dad? Northern Ireland. Okay, Northern Ireland. That sounds like a quieter place to go to. But we got to Northern Ireland before. Obviously there have been tensions there since about 400 years. But the troubles really kicked off in 69. And we got there in 64 and left in 67. So I had three years and I was talking like this when I was a kid. And we picked up the sign, you know, talking to other kids. So you're sounding like a Northern Irish kid because they are talking like that and going to school. And coming home and dad apparently used to listen to us through the door talking like this. And then we came and said, now you got to speak English, speak with English accent. Because they were from south of England. I think they were just freaked out by having kids that didn't sound like their parents. So we did have two, like people can do with languages. You know, if your parents are Spanish speakers or Italian speakers or whatever speakers, French speakers, you might come and speak that language at home and then English out in the street. So we were doing Northern Irish, they were playing about and playing in gangs and running around. Not proper gangs, but kids gangs. And then coming in and going, Mummy, can I have a glass of lemonade? Yeah, mother, can I have a glass of lemonade now? Just ask it in English accent. What was your father's trade that he was moving? That he was in Aden and then Northern Ireland? He worked for all company. He worked for BP, which obviously did bad things in the Gulf of Mexico a while ago. But at the time before that, but it was an all company. I think he just went, he found them in the back of his diary. He said he left the Navy. He joined the Navy just after more than he did sort of like a national service. Then he left and he found it. Oh, it was Anglo-Iranian all company at that time. And he went in there and they said, yes, you could have a job. And so I think he did one job interview and then he was in and just worked his way up. But he redesigned their accounting since there's not terribly flashy, but they were doing accounting in a way that wasn't very useful. It wasn't very useful. They just had a system. If you imagine an oil company, they're making money. So they don't really care. Yeah, how do we count up? I'll recount. It's the piles. We have four piles. Yeah, exactly. You just put the cash in a bag and we'll just put it around there. So he said, why don't we streamline this a bit? And they didn't like what he was doing. And then they thought, oh, no, this is brilliant. Okay, you're in charge of accounting there for the whole of BP. So he was in charge of refinery accounting for a while and then he became a controller. So he just he just moved around these different refineries. He was head of the Northern Ireland BP oil refinery for the accounting department, a chief accountant there. So we just kept moving around like that. So but he was the first person in the family to get a career. His dad was a bus driver. My mom's dad was a cowherder. Wow. Who's found that cowherder who claimed he was a shepherd, which I think is really fun. He says on the bus, the bus certificate of mom's best of it says shepherd. I said this to my uncle, he was a shepherd. He moved cows in and out of bonds, but he dressed really is a picture. The one picture of God. He's in a in a tweed jacket and with waistcoat and a vest. I think you'd call it and and he apparently read and reread the words of the works of Dickens. So he was, I think he was an intelligent person who decided he didn't want to be ambitious in anything and move. He would move cows around and then and then his wife died apparently. And then he sold his house and having become the local authority around the village in Kent where he he lived. He is going around to all the divorcees and then he decided to go and live with his children. So I'm coming to stay with you for six months at a time like a like a king's progress around the country. Yeah. And he just he had enough money to spend. We didn't have a house to live in. He's got to live in their houses. Kind of weird, but I think he's really interesting. Do you remember him visiting and spending six months with you? No, he that's interesting. He didn't maybe because we were moving too quick. Where are you now? Daughter. He would call you from Yemen saying, wait a second. Where are you? I'm trying to catch up with you. I really like the idea of intelligence without ambition and that if you went to a sort of school counselor, they'd say maybe cows. You're really smart, but you have no ambition. Yeah. Lots of time to read and yeah. He was called grandfather with a pipe. We call him grandfather with a pipe. There was a granny and grandfather with a pipe and his wife had passed away before we were four hours born. So I never met her. But I kind of like he just was called girl because you know, if you we all have two sets of quite often, two sets of grandparents. And I always said this is a bit of my standard. You say if you do become a grandparent, you're going to run to your kids and say, we're granny and granddad. Okay, granny and granddad. The others can have the weird names like whoopee and mumps and dingbat and hairspray. Hairspray is coming over. Dingbat, dingbat and hairspray. Grandfather with a pipe. I mean that's what he's doing. It's really funny and it also ties him to a prop for the rest of his life. I know. He must have loved that pipe. You have a younger brother? Yeah. No, older brother. My older brother did the adaptation on Hamlet. He is the academic of the family. Gotcha. And he translates all the language shows, one of them is French, German and Spanish. He is the expert in the languages. I will assume based on the fact that you're still working together, you must have been very close. We were very close because mum died when in 1968. So I was just about to turn, I was just turned six and Mark was just about to turn eight. So we're two years apart. But suddenly this loving mother, she had been a nurse. She'd worked in the hospital in Aden in the refinery and met dad that way. And so she was this loving person, a caring person. You had a cut subscription, all that kind of stuff. Suddenly, boom, out of your life, died of cancer and massive upheaval. And they decided, they talked to each other and said, go to boarding school is the way forward. So we didn't see dad for two thirds of the year when we were at these schools. So it was weird. But yeah, older brother and he's the, he's the, my brother, my dad, I was sitting next to my girlfriend. And dad said, yes, your brother, he has the brain in the family. You have half a brain. I said, just see what I have to deal with this. He didn't really mean that because I know I'm confident enough to know that my brain is sharp. It's not as academically sharp as Mark's, my older brother. What's your age difference? Two years as well. Yeah. Right. And who's oldest? I'm older. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm taller. I'm taller. So you went to the same boarding school at six years old and eight years old? Yeah. Six, yeah. So John's boarding school in, John's school in Port Corp, which is Wales. We were living in Swansea. Probably these names don't be much to people in America, but we're around the world. Cardiff is the big capital. And then it's to the west of that Swansea is a big thing. And in between that, Tony Hopkins came from, I think, Port Talbot and Richard Burton from in and around those areas in the South Wales area. So, but we were, I could have had a Welsh accent. You see, that's what I wanted to be able to pick up all these accents, but I had to get, no, I never got this Welsh accent because we're going to boarding schools. Yeah. So it was suddenly, you know, dad drops you off and yeah, it was, I just did a lot of crying. I was feeling sorry for some and a lot of crying, maybe understandably feeling sorry. Yeah, I was going to say that's the best we had. Such a tough age to grieve and then to be put in a completely new place without any parents. Yes. I just, yeah, I just was, I was clinging onto my, I worked this out. I was clinging onto my brother and he was clinging onto no one. And he had the toughest thing and he was very sharp, very accurately bright. So he got pushed up a year. Now he wasn't very tall as a kid. We're both not a tall family. And, but he got put into the gear above. They had this idea of, so what was he eight when he got there? And he said, you're going to be put with a nine year old who had started to grow up. So he was not only small for his year, but you know, it put into a year whether they're all starting to get bigger. So he hated that. So, I mean, not it's a tough combination as being smaller and smarter than everybody. That is not, no one's, no one's psyched to meet that kid. Now I advise to all parents, don't let your kids jump up. But yeah, unless they're almost famous, you have that storyline almost famous of the kid being advanced. So you would see your dad a third of the year? Just a summer? Yeah, it's in the terms of 10 weeks each, but we would say we go back for weekends. You get weekends and there's a half term thing where you see them for about five days, six days. So you do see them, but it's, yeah, it's about 30 year, you know, three, fifth. It's a small chunk, and then you're just, this idea that at the end of the night, you just go into a dormitory, like a Victorian hospital dormitory, beds and beds and beds and beds and beds and beds and beds, and you get used to that. So it's hellish when you're six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, I stopped crying in a fight with, with Andrew Isherwood, who was better at football than me, he was the school captain, he was the captain of the team, a football soccer, that we, we all lived to play for, but we had a fight, I remember, I think he hit me, and I thought, oh, pain, cry. I thought, oh, I've lost, I've lost this psychological game with him and with our, Chris, we were probably doing windmill fighting, which is what all kids do. And, yeah, I thought, don't ever cry again. So I didn't cry until I was 19 after that. But that's interesting, that sort of analysis, the crying, the crying is the losing. It's, I think, for any parent, this is a good lesson that it only takes five years for your kid to stop crying, and only then, when they get punched. They're gonna have to punch her enough by another kid. Well, I wanted to win the battles and, and crying, you can't, you, you very, very, very carefully fighting with crying, I suppose. Yeah. Crying, you've done so much effort into getting water out of your face, and you can't, and that would be interesting to keep fighting while you're crying. Yeah. I suppose some kids do. But anyway, yeah, I gave up at that point. It doesn't sound like this kind of childhood would have had a lot of vacations attached. Would you guys ever go away? Would you, were there grandparents that you would go visit, or would you travel just to get away? Yeah. We did, because the grandparents, it's all southeast of England, which is the Kent and East Sussex, so that's the Tope. This is geography-wise. If people know vaguely where London is, it's south of that, right down with it. So lots of sea, but we were way over in Western Wales, and then we would come back. Granny, our granny would come over, our grandma would come over and go back. But holidays, not a huge amount of holidays initially, just going home for holidays. But then we moved from Wales, and we went back to where my dad's parents were, our grandparents were. The idea that they would help out, and our grand did help out. My granddad was off on buses, just driving buses, I think. But yeah, it was, you get hardy going to these things. I suppose in the old days, it was British Empire, and they wanted kids to go to boarding schools. It was kind of posher kids to go to boarding schools and become young men who will happily go out and do bad things around the world. And they were the British Empire. Do you have a flag? This is where I developed my, do you have a flag? Oh, we have a, no, we need a flag. Yeah, you need a flag. Otherwise we're going to take your country. But I don't know, I suppose after the age of 11, 12, 13, I was quite happy going to, I was okay going to these boarding schools, because they give you a level of independence, that parents with teenage kids, all that kind of tough times that they have together. Is it wrong for me to opine that, despite it being a place to toughen you up, was there sort of a robust theater department at schools like this? Was that something that was valued, like the theater department? Let me see, the first one wasn't there long enough. We were only there for a year in the one in Wales. And we moved back to the other one. Yes, the head teacher, this is a town called Eastbourne Hastings. Everyone's heard of Battle of Hastings. Brighton, they may have heard of that. That's the big city town, city down the road. So South Coast, and I was in this town called Eastbourne, and my dad had been born. And their head teacher, they really liked doing plays. So I was trying to get into his plays. So they had a robust and driven thing. They're doing a musical and a play every year, I think. And I was desperate to get into these, but I wasn't auditioning well. I'm dyslexic, so if you have dyslexic, they say, right, read out these roles, you're going to be auditioning for this, like you guys must have done, and anyone at schools does that. And getting the words from the page through my brain and out of my mouth, clearly was not easy for me. So I used to go, my Lord, you are coming. I am coming to see you now with... What is that word? And so they think, this is an idiot. Spear carry, we need people to carry spears. How do the spears get on the stage? You will carry the spear. So this happened for year after year after year. So I was pushing for the age of seven, strongly, to do just acting. I didn't know comedy could be sectioned off and leaned into. And so it was just, can I do roles? Can I do roles? And it was all spear carry until I got to late teens, so 15, 16, 17. I do remember auditioning for one play. And at the end, so you read out some of the lead role things, and then the teacher said this unusual thing. He said, what role are you looking for in this play? I thought, large role, hero, kills everyone, gets the girl, runs off with something in that area. How would Jailer be? So I was Jailer, but the Jailer was handcuffed to the lead role. And so when the lead role was going, oh, whoa, it was me. He was doing this, he had this big long chain for going from his wrist to me. So I was quite, I wasn't terribly tall. So I was going around and around the stage and pulling focus as much as I could. So upstaging, I got started by upstaging like crazy. It's very nice to be in a situation where you can both pull focus and also physically pull the lead. Not just figurative, literal pulling. Well, they were doing more of the pulling. I was doing more of the flying. Because they were the Duke of something. It's the comedy of areas. So I think it's the two Dukes, I think, the two twin brothers. So the conceited twin, twin Dukes, twin posh people, and they have twins, they have servants. Each other's servants are actually twins. They've all been separated at birth and they don't know they exist. So they keep coming over, oh, it's you. No, it doesn't. All that kind of stuff. So I'm just going round and round and round and round. But I even had a helmet on with a visor. So you know, olden days of helmets, big metal helmet, a visor on that would go up and down. And it had one of the teachers said to me, oh, you could put some string or cotton on that. And you could pull it down the back and then you could make the visor go up and down like it was automatic, like it was an electric visor. And all that's fun. Not much to do with Shakespeare. So I did put this on and I was using it and I was allowed to use it in the play. So it got hysterical laugh. Imagine a Shakespeare play going on, even though it's a comedy play. It's going on and on and on. And then I'm trying to drink through this visor. It had a bar down there and a bar there. So it wasn't a completely closed visor like that. It was just a local one. It's called Cromwellian helmet from our 1600s. And it's quite a distinctive kind of helmet, but it has this thing. And if you're trying to drink, there was a bar scene and I was trying to drink through this thing. And then I go, oh, and so I'm pulling focus because I'm trying to drink through this thing. And then I just go, oh, and then I do this and I pull it and the thing goes up and then I just drink. And then it comes down again. So it's like, it's ridiculous. It's like I've got an electric visor and it killed it, murdered it, stopped the play. And the other kids were coming out to watch. And it was the first time I felt, oh, this is good. This is the beginning of something. And one of the teachers after this, the silver line saying, very funny is this is a lesson the next week. It's very funny is, but not really Shakespeare, is it? No, sir, but I'll do all right by it. Hey, we're going to take a quick break and hear from some of our sponsors. This episode of Family Trips is brought to you by Wild Grain. Hey, Basheem. Hey, Sufi. Are you excited about the fact that there is a first bake from frozen subscription box for sourdough breads, artisanal pastries and fresh pastas? Yeah, it's incredible. Wild Grain uses simple ingredients you can pronounce in a slow fermentation process that can be easier on your belly and richer in nutrients and antioxidants. There's no preservatives and no shortcuts. And Sufi, they got boxes. They're fully customizable. In addition to their variety box, they have a gluten free box, vegan box. Hello. Hello. How about that? A new protein box. What about, here's the problem, Bashe. What if our listeners are saying this all sounds well and good, but what about time, my friend? I don't have the time for this sort of thing. 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Their meal selection evolves with fresh updates, offering something for everyone and letting you personalize every order. Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash trips for up to 25 free meals. That's no joke. That's right. Up to 25 free meals with Marley Spoon. That's Marley Spoon.com slash offer slash trips for up to 25 free meals. Here we go. So you leave school and obviously you have a performer blood in your body at this point, you know. And then you sort of become a street performer. Like, how does that leap happen? Well, it starts this at 7 I Want to Do Place. And I think I really liked it. I didn't know you could be a professional actor. I didn't realize that until late at 16. I think I brought that out. So I said, I made a pack, like a religious pack with myself going, this is that. If I was going to cut blood and do it with my own hands and go, I am doing this. So there was a certain parental pressure to go to university and, you know, your mother didn't go to university and I didn't get an university. I'm going to go through that rigmarole, but I'm not going to do that. And so do you want to be a quantist? Yes, so they're still done quite now. What a quantist does civil engineering. I can add up. I'm quite mathematical. I was good. Very good at math. Bizarre. You know, because usually you're your art's person getting into doing acting, but I was a science person going to do acting. So I had to go to university. I did accounting and finance, financial management, which is almost the same degree that Mick Jagger did at his university. But then we both dropped out. I'm just tracking Mick Jagger here. And so I dropped out at 19. So I got to university. I'd already made this pack. I'm not going to do a sensible job and I'm going to go into acting. So I was already, you know, I broke into Pinewood Studios when I was 15. I worked out where that was and I tried to get higher at 15. I got out of boarding school to go and audition in London, which is a 60 mile journey in the middle of term time to audition for the National Youth Theatre. I did really weird things. So I was a driven twit from a very young age. And I get to university and I'm still trying to do weird things to get my career going. The Edma Festival, people might have heard of this. It's a big festival here in Scotland. I did 12 of those over 13 years trying to get things going. So I thought I dropped out university at 19. I thought, well, now I've dropped out. I'm not going to do a degree in accounting and finance because that's going to be a burden. If I get this degree, it's going to be, oh, you're going to have to go and do that. So no, I don't want that. And I pushed and I started, I've been doing sketches at the Edma Festival, like Python because the pythons had come from Oxford and Cambridge and they all went to this Edma Festival, Fringe Festival. Did you do it with a troop or were you on your own? No, I built a troop. I made a troop. I was in Sheffield University. So that's a big industrial city halfway up the country. And I said, who's going to Edinburgh? I'm going to go to Edinburgh. As soon as I get to that university, oh, we don't go. We lost money some years ago. So we don't go. You don't go? This is my whole plan. I'm a big planner. And I learned my best. This isn't interesting. I learned my best. I said, I don't have the confidence to take a show to Edinburgh because I'm only 19, but I'm going to assume I have the confidence. I'm going to borrow confidence from my future self. And then once I've done it, I will have that confidence because I've already done it. So this is this sort of mind trick I play with myself. So I went around saying, we're going to win. I'm going to win. You want to come? I literally begged people for about four months. I was praying people for my childhood come to Edinburgh, my brother and people from previous school. And we got up there and we did a show. It was called Fringe Flung Luncheon. It was terrible. It was a sketch show on at 12 noon. What a ridiculous thing. So I was in the mix and there were people who did really well. Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson. They were doing their finishing year. They won all loads of awards in that year, 81. And we failed dismally, but I got there. But I was still, I was this cocky. We're doing it. Even though what we're doing is pretty rubbishy. I did three years of that and they got nowhere. No one picked me out. I was expecting TV people to come and say, you, I can see something in you. We're going to bring you away. We're bringing the TV, the BBC would love to have you. But no, they didn't. So at the end of that, I was just sort of, what do I do now? So I'd already half moved to London and I started street performing in London. That's how I did it because I'd seen it at the Edinburgh Festival and people had amazing reaction. If anyone ever goes to that festival or any festival, there's quite often lots of people around. And if you start doing something in the street, people go, oh, there's someone doing something in the street. Let's watch this person doing something in the street. Now that's not real. That's just a festival situation. You get down to London and you say, I'm going to do something in the street. And the people say, oh, there's an idiot in the street and they just walk past you. And you have to be really interesting before they say, that idiot's quite interesting. I'm going to stop and watch that video. So that's, I got to, 85 got to start performing in Covent Garden. And initially we were terrible. I was with a partner, Rob Ballard, and we were just terrible. We had confidence that we could do sketches, but sketches do not work on the street. So we failed for a year and then we started getting better. Then we did a sword fighting thing, which links into Hamlet because I had directed Three Musketeers at university. Having watched Richard Lester Three Musketeers on the television, great fellow, Three Musketeers, Four Musketeers with all those, it's just a great version of it. Cause obviously there'd been many versions of it. If I can just jump in real quick, how did your father at the time and how did your brother with the full brain feel about the fact that you were just sort of sword fighting in the street for a living? In Covent Garden. My brother was okay about it because he sort of decided he didn't want to be the academic in life and he, he decided to be assistant librarian. He's anti ambitious. My brother is so I said, I'm going to go from grandpa with a pipe. He got the ambition from grandpa with a pipe. I was talking earlier. I was thinking maybe that is what Mark was trying. And dad was going, but your, your A love, your A was, you know, the exam she took when he was 18 were A1, AB, which is like, you know, he must have got 95% 90% here was right up there. I was getting 80% and, and dad was impressed by me or that was surprised by my own level was, I remember where's Mark was the brain. So it was fine. It was all fine, but I was just determined. I could smash her thing. So that was happening with dad and we had a stepmother who stepmother kept saying to me, you got to get a proper job. I'm not going to get proper job. Never going to get proper job. I'm doing this. Um, and it was dad did say, he's sure when I was on the streets in London, he says, you sure you didn't prefer having a, you know, company car and thing and then being a accountant. No, don't do that. I'm not, I was so certain. This was the way thing. I don't know about you. You set when you, you're saying to adjust, but, um, that is the luck he's thinking in life. If you know what you want to do, yeah, that is so much better than because dad was 18. He's just joking. He says, I still don't know what I want to do with my life, but I just knew and I just seven and seen a play and I really want to do this. And at 16, I'm absolutely doing this. And I just kept pushing and pushing and pushing until the world gave in. I think I'm just said it's coming. So street pouring wasn't the thing, but it did teach me amazing stuff. I was sword fighting on the streets of London. I got this great picture on, on the line of me and Rob, my partner, sword fighting with a crowd around it. And that ends up being me sort of fighting against myself in Hamlet. And, um, it just, I, I started building things and setting things up for that way and performing abroad. You know, Memphis in May festival. That's the first one I did in 87 or 88, I think 88. That's when I first, my first gigs in America was in Overton Square in Memphis. How crazy is that? You know, get flown out because they celebrate different countries. You should we're doing a Bretton. Oh, she gets some people in the street because they're trying. It's, it's an artistic era over to square. So that was my first gig. I keep going back to Memphis when I play there and I go to over to the square. I said, I played here and the people were, I don't care. So you got flown in to, to street perform in Memphis. Yeah, we got to play. So they paid for the flights. They pay this no money. And they put us up with the holiday in. So the holiday in and a flight and that's it. And then if we worked on the street and make, got a bit of money. So I did this show. My first show was to US Marines in a marching band. And they were waiting around to do the thing the next day. And I did a show to them. I got about 20 bucks. And so I could have breakfast and it was, that was great. It was a, it was a wonderful experience. But there was some British people there saying, why are you in Memphis? What are you doing in Memphis? I'm here to perform. So it was, but I've had great gigs in Memphis ever since then. And you mentioned a stepmother. How old were you when your dad remarried? 13. So we had seven days. Did you ever, did you ever go on a holiday with your stepmother? With the four of you, with your brother? The four of us? Yes. I think we did do the four of us. And then it cut down to the three of us. Cause Mark was, he was out as soon as he was 18. He was off dust. And it, yeah, it's difficult for my stepmother coming in. I was 13, my brother was 15. Tricky thing for her, but she also thought in a different way to us. Or to me particularly, because she was saying, fit in to society and know your place kind of thing. And I was saying, no, that's, that doesn't work with, I'm going to go for your dreams. And she's saying, no, I have no dreams or, you know, I'm sorry. I have no dreams. But I think she was, she was high. She was actually quite talented. She was very talented. Apparently she took an exam for the whole of the country and came fifth in the country. And she, she was, she was bright and sharp. But again, talking about, and the ambitious, I don't think she thought ambition was a good thing. Right. But I did. And so I wanted to be really ambitious. So, yeah, she was there and dad was saying, well, as long as you're happy and there was a period of time of me, you know, flailing, dropping out of uni at 19, refusing to take the degree in accounting and finance and, and not really proving that I could do it. So I sort of fell my way through a bit and, and just tread the water until the stand. I went solo on the streets. That was the thing about in 87. In the spring of 87, I went solo on the streets. And that's when I saw, because I never thought I could be a solo performer. So going from, I was a four person act. I don't know how you, Seth, how you started doing comedy and just your career. We were like an improv troupe. So we were usually with like four others. Well, you know, this thing, when we grow up with Python, Python were gods on Mount Olympus. So you have to be in a group and that's how you do it. And I, and I felt instinctively when I was younger that I could, I could play someone like this. Why do I have been in charge of everything? Oh, I'm an idiot. So I can play these small characters or I could play a big character or nerdy character. I could just, I felt I could do that. Michael Palin was really my personal. I'm very similar to that. But you put on costumes and you do that in a sketch. And then on the street, it was nothing like that. You, the, the, the attention span for the audience, adults become children and children become animals. That's how it works. You have to do something where you're going to say, I'm going to set fire to my own body and die. And then they go, well, stick around and watch the guy die. It is. I mean, we used to, we used to do Edinburgh and those street performers. That's exactly it. And it would be like, you would have to make an announcement and continue to like restate the premise and build an audience. And it would be some, you know, ultimately disappointing payoff, but the entertainment was to hold people's attention. Yeah. And I think advertising a show at Edinburgh, that is the thing that you can do and you do whatever you can think you can do to get. I come to this show and at the end was once you do it as it's you're doing for living down in London and there's no particular that is the show. I found it was fit. Had to be physical situation comedy. I couldn't be situational. I had to be physical. I want to get on to this unicycle and then I'm going to throw this thing. I, in the end, I was getting on. I, I caught up my big bullshit show. I was getting on a five foot unicycle, getting into handcuffs as a solo performance. I was scape for this, these handcuffs. If people download, believe the, the ideas of stroke. This is the documentary. There's somebody videoed us and some got me back in 89. I think it is trying to go. I'm in this thing and I'm, and I'm going to get out in 30 seconds. I'm going to get to, so that's, and I call it my big bullshit show because even if it was raining, people would go, hang on, they could die. They could die. They got out. They didn't die. And there is two pence for the, for your life for your last 45 minutes. I will give you, sometimes I give terrible money. We had to suggest money, which was, was the thing. But anyway, yeah, the street before him really made me cause I lost all my confidence and then I rebuilt myself. You know, they talk about things. We're going to strip you down, rebuild you. I actually did that to myself and I ended up with his gut confidence. I could stand on the West Piazza Covent Garden, which is a huge opera pitch. And there's no roof. It's just a big area and I can stand there and I would just burble away. Good afternoon. I'm going to, I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm going to kill myself. I will kill birds and cats and dogs, but not, not badly. These are animals that wish to die. It's the whole Switzerland thing. And I learned to talk in this word wrap thing. And I started it with a double act because we had, you had to encourage people to come forward. And if you say people come forward now, I'm going to do a show that go, no, you're an idiot and you're going to be a bad show. That's why you're asking us to come forward. And it'd be better to say, could everyone back up and go away please? Cause we're going to do a show here and we don't want anyone to watch. And if you said that, they go, oh, let's, let's watch. So it was all counterintuitive. And in the end I developed this confidence and then people were saying you should do stand up. And I just thought I'm not a solo performer. And I thought, no, I have to do stand up because I'm getting nowhere here. And I thought at 25, I would be a TV show part of a group. I'm getting it just like the pythons if you're tracking their career. And I was just nowhere. And I just, and I'd be trying to get somewhere as fast as possible. I changed that into getting somewhere as good as possible. I realized that no one gives a damn if you've learned to do some rubbishy thing really fast. But they do, if you take in 10 years to get really good, then there's good thing. I really like this good thing, but not this fast thing. So I just, I swapped, I swapped my whole style, my whole technique around my whole strategy. And then it started, people started turning up and watching going, hey, hey, come on. And then I took that into stand up and early stand up was a bit all over the place. And then gradually I realized I could bring the sketches back in and I could introduce ideas and say, that's kind of like this going, what are you doing? And I realized that Richard Pryor technique, I could do this thing of having two characters talking to each other. And he did that occasionally. He would have two characters talking to each other. And I took that, I stole that off Richard. Did your father and stepmother ever come to Covent Garden? Did they ever be like, well, let's see? Not Covent Garden, but we have a niche called the Guardian, which like New York Times kind of cashier that kind of importance. And we have, I think, already four, which should be PRS, NPR. So when NPR equivalent and New York Times equivalent started saying, hey, there is an upcoming surreal comedian. Then that's, and my mother's, if I stepmother's like getting free sandwiches in pubs, where your Kate is, are you linked to Eddie? Oh, right. Well, yeah. And so it suddenly became something else. And then I was, I had arrived and it all changed. That wasn't that, but Kate did change her attitude. So she no longer said, when are you going to get a proper job? And so I wasn't fighting that battle in particular because, you know, Kate was fighting her fight and dad was kind of as long as you're happy. And then we got to a happiness place. And then eventually, you know, I was doing the richest TV series out in LA for FX and I flew dead out to come and see the opening of the second season. And he seemed quite happy about that. And he came to the, when Dan the Death of Joe, I was nominated for best actor there and he came to the, to the award ceremony and stuff. So it gradually got to this better place. But it took a long time, but I wasn't worried about it so much because I was just so deciding, you know, I'm doing this, I'm doing this, I'm doing this. And then gradually it started to work because I really did think I could do this on a, on a world level. And, but the world was saying, no, you can't, you're rubbish. You see how rubbish you are. And people are walking away and even your early street performing is terrible. And the first three shows you did at Edinburgh were that good. My brother kept, he was a good talisman. He would say, yeah, it happened that show, but it was a bit rubbishy. What? Well, it was kind of rubbish. It wasn't very good. So Mark would often just be very blunt. And there was one particular stand-up show he told me he'd been a year in Spain learning Spanish. And he came back and he said, whoa, what are you doing? No, this is good. This is good. I'm doing something good. Yeah, you've, something's happened. And nothing, all that happened is I'd got the feet under the table, learn how to do my technique of stand-up, which is essentially I'm doing sketch comedy in my stand-up. But I've developed a narrator who says, why is it? Why do we have dinosaurs for 165 million years? If there was a God, why did he say, I want to test drive monsters for 165 million years? What about humans? Should we get the humans like us? No, no, no, no. I want to do monsters first. And I want 165 million years. What will they do? They're going to go, like pirates. Yeah, like pirates. And then they got to poo and eat and screw. And that's it. For 165 million years. That's not good. God, that's what I want to do. So you can get into that and I can act out God and then I act out all the dinosaurs. And I really, I gradually, I thought everyone was doing this and not, it's not a standard way of doing stand-up apparently. But I've come such a, such a weird cat, you know, going from sketch comedy through street performing into stand-up, that is odd. And then going into drama after that. So that's what I bring to the Hamlet table is I've just, I've had such an odd career that I've got to be doing something different. They may not be quite everyone's cup of tea, but it's just, it's different because I know how to perform two people as opposed to eight people. In the street, we were there just like they were in Shakespeare's day. They'd only started building the theaters, you know, of one generation before, before that we hadn't had theaters in England since the Roman times. That's over a thousand years because Christianity said, no, you can't do, no, you can't talk about that. No, no, no revenge plays. No, it's all going to be about religion for a thousand years. And then, and then it got better. So yeah, that's what I think I bring to the Hamlet table, all this strange training, accidental training, you know, with no one saying, now read this from a book. I've just sort of worked it out slowly. Can I ask a question about, you mentioned Monty Python and we were very lucky because it was on public television in America and my parents had watched it in college and then it was sort of always running. And as we sort of became interested in comedy and we're watching Saturday Night Live, we were watching it, but, and we loved it, but we knew it was a thing that had been on, you know, it was a repeat of a thing that had already happened. What was that phenomenon like when that show started? How old were you and how were you watching it? Was it, was it something you watched at boarding school with other boarding school kids? And obviously it was seismic. Yeah, it, it was seismic. There was a, there was a radio show, the Proceedic, called the Goon Show, Peter Sellers, a guy called Spike Milligan, and, and they did stuff that all the pythons watched. So that, the idea was it's surreal, didn't have ends, went off in tangents, did weird things. They still watched that and they started doing it when it's 69. So I'm not watching it at 69. Even when it finishes in 73, I'm still too young and I'm at boarding school and they don't let you watch television at the ones I was at. And dad started giving me Goon's tapes. So I'm getting surreal comedy coming into my brain through these tapes because it's full. You could have a tape recorder and you could listen to those and dad would record them when he was working out in the Middle East and because they had radio for Europeans and here's the Goon Show from Radio Dubai. So that's the bizarre things I first learned of. And then a friend of my, my stepmother, she, she said, here's a tape of the pythons at Live at Drury Lane in this big theater. They played that which had been a real big rock star arrival. They'd done it. They'd done all the TV series. Then they did Drury Lane and all these people from bands started turning up and they go, wow, what a big hit. And that tape, I listened to loads and loads on that. And then I got the Holy Grail. I got an audio cassette of that. I started listening to that and I started repeating it, memorizing it and repeating stuff. And then I realized I needed to see, so I didn't actually see the TV series until later. And then I thought, I think I get the films and the cassettes of the films really early on. So I just started inhaling it, matching time, handkerchief. Got a cassette of that, which is a bit weird because it is actually three different sides of two, of a two sided record because they did mix spooling on one side. And so I just was inhaling these things and thinking, these are my people. These are my gods. And I need to do this stuff. So that's, that's how that came through. But I was a little bit behind the loop on it. But because of audio cassettes and repeats and things, I could just listen to it my own time. And it was again and again and again, a bit like a mantra, a bit like, I found my religion. Well, it is true that I think all of us are lucky to have known early on what it was we wanted to do. I think people in a lot of places are going to be lucky to see you soon. Australia, I know you're going to do your show. You mentioned Philadelphia, Boston, DC are all coming up. Tampa is coming up as well. So those are all coming up. I'm not sure when this is going out. Hopefully it's going to soon or rather later. Yes. Yeah, yeah, we'll get you out next week. But before we let you go, Josh has to ask you our speed round questions. I also just, just quickly on the Hamlet because it is, you know, as you've said and you're not wrong, Shakespeare can be intimidating, but it is an adapted, I don't, I mean, truncated is the wrong word, but it is, you know. Well, no, it is a bridge. I mean, because the point is, is there were three versions and he never signed off on any of them and said, this is the definitive one. So you have to make your own mind up and how you do it. The four and a half hour version. I don't believe they were performing that back then. I think he added it saying, oh, you want the director's cut of this play. So somebody printed it apparently without his permission and they kept doing this. And they think, well, why don't you just print his own Ben Johnson got all these things printed anyway. So you have to go into those plays and the first, the first quarter, second quarter and first failure and choose what you want to. And that's what my brother did with his academic ring saying, that's no good. We're going to keep this. This is weird. That's strange. He repeats himself. There's we're not doing that. We're doing that. And so we all three of us are my director, Selena Kadel. We chose it. So that's how we did it. So it is a two hour production, but most productions should, should be less than the four and a half hour endless version because that's, I don't think that's the right version to do. Yeah. So just if you're thinking about going to see it, it is accessible and it is fully Shakespearean as well. And it is visceral all the beauty of the poetry. But if you're a fan of Shakespeare, I think you're like, and if you're not a fan of Shakespeare, I think you're also like it because people walk out going, I get it now. I get it now because we've made it into a play. The story is a real person. You know, if you know Hamnet, the idea that he wrote it all about his son, it isn't about his son. It's about some Saxo grammaticus was the historian in Denmark who wrote about this guy, Amloth, who was from Jutland who came to England and fought a battle and married a woman and went back and fought her. And his uncle killed his father. And so that was a legendary story, not a myth story, but a legendary story. So it could well have been true or elements of truth in it. So that story turned into Hamlet and he did have a son called Hamlet, but that's a different thing and full of great imagination. But this is Hamlet and we made it work. And so that's why it's sold 65,000 tickets. It's just going on and on and on. I'm not going to stop. I'm just going to go on forever around the world. Yes, Australia, New Zealand, Beckham. All right. Here we go. Speed, speed round questions. Susie, you can only pick one of these. Is your ideal vacation relaxing, adventurous or educational? Well, I'd say educational. What is your favorite means of transportation? Cube in London. All right. If you could take a vacation with any family, alive or dead, real or fictional, other than your own family, what family would you like to take a vacation with? Family. The Flintstones. Lovely. If you had to be stranded on a desert island with one member of your family, who would it be? Well, it would be with my brother. Lovely. It's cool. We're 50% the same, 50% totally different. Perfect. What would be your dream destination for a family vacation? A desert island with a lot of education. What is your hometown? What do you consider your hometown? Hometown is probably London or Los Angeles or New York. Well, London, if you had to get more families to come visit London, if you were in charge of sort of getting that, how would you tell them to come? What would you recommend? London has everything. Don't worry about the weather so much, but we do just have everything. We have politics. We have sports. We have arts and entertainment. We have filmmaking. It just has everything. So if you want, if you're excited by anything in life, then go to London because it has it all. And then Seth has our final questions. First of all, I will say one of the greatest things, because I just went back to London for the first time in 10 years and remembered that I saw you perform in Brixton in maybe 1999, 2000. In the big room, Brixton Academy? Yeah. One of the great live performances. So I've ever seen. Beautiful. All right, my last question is, Susie, have you ever been to the Grand Canyon? I have been to Grand Canyon. And was it worth it? Yes. Once you're there, you go, oh, there it is. It was worth it particularly because we flew over, I think it's Lake Las Vegas and there was a wild Mustang, mother and father and a baby foal drinking from the lake. So wow, that is real. That is real. I want to set that up. That just three of them in the middle of the day drinking from the lake. How beautiful is that? So that made it for me. I feel like for as big as that canyon is, you could have gotten that deer drinking from a lake somewhere else. It was a horse. It was a horse. It was a horse. Wild Mustang, introduced by the conquistadoras. Oh, there you go. Oh my God. Thank you so much. Always a joy to see you, Susie. Really appreciate it. Great story to you guys. Thank you, thank you. Bye. Thank you. I moved away when there was unrest. Curiously went to Northern Ireland. And she went away at six years old to boarding school. Cried until the fight after playing football. Cried until she got beat. And then was done with it. Cried until she got beat. Those tears stopped running. Cried until she got beat. Later she... I built a troop for Edinburgh. Festival for 12 or 13 years. She cut her teeth and put on sketch shows. I built a troop for Edinburgh. Festival for 12 or 13 years. She cut her teeth and put on sketch shows. Directed the three musketeers. And she... Pwned her skills and realized she had to go. To the people and put on her bullshit shows. Soaring in the streets. Soaring in the streets. Performing in the streets. Unicycle. Soaring in the streets. Went solo. Performing in the streets. This and that. Soaring in the streets. Ruppin'. Soaring in the streets. Fact she crushed it. Soaring in the streets. Doing Hamlet. Started out in the streets.